Composing theWorld: Harmony in the Medieval Platonic Cosmos by Andrew Hicks (review)

'We can hear the universe!' Andrew Hicks begins his account of harmony in the medieval cosmos by considering some of its recent resonances. In September 2015, the Laser Interferometer Gravity Observatory detected for the first time a gravitational wave. This 'transient ripple' (p. 1) was the faint trace of a collision between two black holes, minutely perceptible across vast distances of space and time. Hicks writes that 'scientists associated with the project describe the detection… as an act of listening' (p. 2). Desiring to hear and thereby to know the heavens, we are perhaps not so very far from the music of the spheres.

This is not the only ongoing reverberation of the musical cosmos. Hicks lists a number of recent thinkers with increasing currency in the musicological academy—Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Maurice Merleau-Ponty—who are part of a 'continued and indeed resurgent recourse to musical metaphors, analogies, and expressive modalities in contemporary philosophy' (p. 12). He suggests that this renewed interest in musical modalities 'makes a more robust account, on its own terms, of the premodern but postclassical history of such modalities all the more pressing' (p. 12; emphasis original). These then are the contemporary motivations for Hicks's study.

Composing the Worldtreats harmony in the cosmos as described by a small group of natural philosophers working in the twelfth century. It focuses on their reception and development of the late-ancient Platonism that they found in the writing of Calcidius, Macrobius, Martianus Capella, and Boethius. One might here quibble that this is rather narrower than what is promised in the book's subtitle; the cosmos described by these natural philosophers was articulated in a more learned dialogue with the Platonic tradition than was perhaps common in the medieval period, but it was not the only medieval cosmos, nor even the only one that might reasonably be described as Platonic. This would, however, be remarkably ungenerous. Hicks's book contains a finely considered treatment of speculative musical thought in the twelfth century. He handles his texts carefully and the closeness of his philological scrutiny is repaid in compelling arguments, expressed in lively and detailed prose. Composing the Worldis an exciting book about medieval music.

The essential thesis set out in Hicks's book is that music theory played a 'foundational and often normative role within the development of medieval cosmological models' (p. 5). Hicks's argument should interest musicologists since it suggests a much broader compass for the speculative musical thought of the twelfth century than has yet been recognized. It should also interest intellectual historians, for whom the natural philosophy of the twelfth century has long been a familiar terrain. Hicks's knowledge of the speculative tradition of musical theory and his musicological commitments and sensitivities allow him to sound previously unheard harmonies in the medieval discussion.

In the Prelude, Hicks sets out the trajectories and historical motivations for his study. He writes that scholars working on the twelfth century have reaped 'only a meagre harvest in the field of music theory' (p. 6). This is not because the ground is infertile; since Charles Homer Haskins, historians have celebrated the century for its intellectual fruitfulness, though not always in his terms. Hicks suggests instead that 'modern disciplinary divisions and musicological expectations' (p. 6) have left scholars inattentive to the richness of that century's musical speculation. By turning to the deployment of music theory in the writing of natural philosophers, which has not been a traditional object of musicological inquiry, Hicks reveals 'a world of musical speculation, and musical speculation on the world', a world that offers 'sometimes surprising correctives to the "standard narratives" of music history' (p. 8).

The natural philosophers who populate the pages of Hicks's book have long been associated with the city and so-called 'school' of Chartres. This label has been inherited from the...